


Resurgam

by eve11



Category: Farscape
Genre: Episode Fix-it, Gen, Origin Story
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-15
Updated: 2021-01-15
Packaged: 2021-03-12 19:21:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,845
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28765488
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eve11/pseuds/eve11
Summary: Salvaging Stark.Episode fix-it, Season 4 "Hot to Katratzi"





	Resurgam

**Author's Note:**

> Archiving older Farscape stories. Written in September 2003.

\-------------

_Petals. The smallest of footholds, but something coaxed them forward._

_Here. Hold on to these. They are yours._

_He didn’t understand the words. Not yet. But he knew what to do. He held on._

\------------

Every day Stark went to work with his family in the lemnat fields. He didn't know why Baniks had to pick the flowers, just that they traded petals for food, and the commune suffered when they failed to fill the day's quota. Baniks did not much care for the why of things. Outsiders would say they cared for little beyond work and death. 

Stark was seven cycles old. He knew how to count to seven, seven petals meant you could pick the flower. Less and it wasn't ready. He was seven cycles old, one for each petal on a lemnat flower, and when the petals ran out he found another flower and started again. 

\-----------

_Shapes. Soft. Thin._

_Hold on to these._

_Pain. Breath._

_Hold on. Don’t let go._

\-----------

When he was seven cycles old the world started to fade away. Color abandoned him first; vibrant red faded to rust, blue sunk in to black, violet and white merged together into gray. The sky was permanently cloudy, the sun went from orange to a gray ghost at his back. In the fields, the flowers dimmed. 

It wasn't his place to wonder at the color of the flowers. And so when the colors started fading he blinked a bit more in the morning and then went out into the fields. Every day he went to work with his family in the lemnat fields, every day the lemnat flowers grew paler and paler at his fingertips. And when finally the shapes began to blur, when the petals became ashen smudges he kept track with his fingers alone, meticulously counting each fold up to seven. 

His cousins clicked their tongues when he tripped over lemnat roots in the fields. His aunts and uncles shook his basket as they walked by, stems rustling against braided vine. 

"Too slow," they said. 

His rations diminished and he felt colder and colder, gray fog surrounding him until not even the sun at his back could keep him warm. 

\----------

_"Stark."_

_He hadn’t realized there was silence until she spoke. Silence. Voice. Words._

_"Where--?"_

_"Shh. You’ve done well."_

\-----------

One day in the field he saw a light, a bright orange splash burning amid the haze. It was safe, nourishing, and he left his basket in the field to follow it. Others that day saw a pale, thin Banik abandon the parallel planting rows and march out of the field on a straight course for the camps, trailing a rain of lemnat petals behind him. 

He followed the light into his sister-clan's camp, to the mouth of a scratchy tent. He grasped the doorway, rough edges defining tent folds in his palms, orange sun smearing streaks and color through his vision for the first time in seven on seven days or more.

"What is it?" he asked. "It's beautiful."

Others moved in the tent, a shifting fog all around him. He was picked up and hurried through a whirl of gray haze, calloused hands and cautious voices.

"Stykera . . .?"

"It's in the eyes . . ."

"What do you see?" 

" . . . mercy take him, it's in the eyes."

"Help her, Stykera."

He felt a straw pallet, felt a weathered wrinkled face in the middle of the orange glow, heard murmuring voices from the gray around him. "Help her, Stykera, it's her time."

The room grew intensely bright. Stark tried to close his eyes and found he could not, and suddenly . . .

_. . . flowers, sweat and sun and her name was Vesh and she had three generations of sons -- hard workers, so proud! Slaves, so shamed! -- and she had never seen a day of freedom in her life, not one until now!_

Vesh passed through him in an explosion of ecstasy, fleeing to a place he knew had been with him always, her energy stretching the limits of his flesh until he shuddered, then screamed. 

In him, she left a lifetime of lemnat petals behind.

\----------

_"Can you see?"_

_"No."_

_"Here." Red and green. Colors swam in front of him. Long, thin green stalks. Red petals, sharp-angled but soft against a backdrop of gray._

_"You will have to keep this place in your mind, Stark."_

_"Stark?" He looked up. The colors shifted and coalesced around a girl. A Banik girl. Banik. She sat cross-legged, a smudge of brown hair and brown shift amid the tall green grass._

_She smiled. "Yes, Stark. That is you. My name is Maurin."_

\------------

The affliction was through his eyes and difficult to manage. Such a far-reaching sense. Vesh had unsealed both his eyes and there were no Stykera among the camp to teach him control. Stykera were precious few and valuable; no matter how hard the Baniks tried, they were never allowed to keep them.

They hid him from the overseers for as long as they could. They wrapped his energy-ravaged face in strips of tattered blankets. They resorted to old hymns and chants for guidance. Stark was seven cycles old, and every day he lived in a black world made bright only with the death of his kin. Each death he saw burned through him like a flame. Each left something behind. He filled himself with cycles of others’ pain and pleasure. His brothers had to hold him down during the day, pin him writhing on the floor when the light beckoned him. They moved him only under cover of night, only when the sharp eyes of the overseers were trained elsewhere. 

It didn’t last. Baniks do not worry about the why of things, and they have no gift for obscuring the truth. When an overseer stormed into his family tent one day, Stark’s relatives skittered away from the entrance and said he had been badly burned. He would most likely die in the next seven days, they said, not realizing they had said the same thing seven on seven days before. There was a telling silence, then movement, a shriek, and the tent exploded into white-orange light around him. Stark couldn’t remember crossing the room, but when the trance left him one of his cousins was dead at his side, leaving seven bitter, bitter morning frosts behind. 

He never returned to his family. The overseer snatched him away and that same day sold him -- blind, bound and wretched -- to Kalish traders. 

Then there was nothing but the pull of orange tides, orange waves that crashed over him, buffeted him in a spray of sight, sound and the memories of others. No sensations but abject pain or ecstasy. No body-sense. No body memory except, at times, the phantom feeling of lemnat petals under his fingertips.

\------------

_"Maurin. Where are we?"_

_"This is a secret place. They don’t know I’ve been here. You know flowers from before, I know them from here, so we meet. Can you feel the petals?"_

_"Yes." He looked down; the hands he saw were empty. "But--"_

_"The feeling is your physical body. The sight is still your inner eye. We may never be able to heal that damage."_

_Heal. Body. He couldn’t see it, but he finally recognized this limit of flesh and bone._

_"You pulled me back," he said, amazed._

_"You found yourself, Stark. For a long time I did not think you could."_

_Time? A long time? "But you’ve just brought me here. We’ve only just met."_

_She held out her arm, taking in everything -- garden, walls, flowers, voice, words, sight, sound._

_"We made this place together. It has taken us over a cycle."_

\------------

Petals. The smallest of footholds, but something coaxed them forward.

He bit. He kicked and clawed, he tore at his own skin. Thoughts spilled from his mind; he could not control what he saw or what he showed. All of it -- horror, pain, death, release –- he lived all of it over and over again. 

But when the Scarrans returned him each night, writhing with the dying thoughts of their tortured prisoners, someone put petals in his hands. When night after night he shivered and screamed adrift, strong arms held him close. A soothing voice whispered in his ear, a warm hand wrapped around his fist and didn’t let go. 

"Hold on," she said. 

He couldn’t see, couldn’t speak or hear. But night after night a disciplined mind merged with his, bridging calm over chaos, teaching, healing what she could. 

"Just hold on."

\------------

_"I remember," he said. "You. I remember you!"_

_"Yes. We are almost finished." Maurin let out a breath and sank back against the grass, suddenly small. The garden dimmed around her form._

_With a thought he was at her side. "What’s wrong?" he asked, but his chest ached. He recognized this; he knew it intimately._

_"I’m old, Stark."_

_"No," he pleaded. "You’re just a child."_

_"I was when I came to this place. It was a long time ago. Stark, it’s my time."_

_"It’s not! It’s not, you’re fine."_

_She gave him a sad smile. "You know better than that."_

_The garden wavered and he bit back a wail. "Don’t go. I don’t know what I am without you."_

_"Shh. You do know."_

_His hands fluttered over her form. Afraid to touch. Afraid that she would give and break like lemnat petals in a clumsy grasp._

_"What do you see?" she asked. "When you look at our people, what do you see?"_

_"Emptiness." A thousand voices were behind the word. "Despair disguised as indifference."_

_"You see the truth. Keep it with you. When the time comes, remind our people what they have lost."_

_Around them, red and green sank into gray._

_"Please—"_

_They were losing words; soon everything would be gone. Maurin struggled to speak. "You have power. Stark. You must understand."_

_"No! No, you understand!" Hands balled into fists, he wanted to scream and kick and cry. "I can’t—"_

_She silenced him with a gesture, raising a pale thin arm in the dissipating light. "You . . ."_

_He couldn’t stop her. The garden pulsed like a living thing as she touched his forehead. He felt . . . he saw . . . all of her energy channeled through stone walls, whispering grass, red flowers. Into him. Through him. Brilliant, aching, reverberating. Fading, everything fading around the echo of words._

_You are the prison your enemy creates and inhabits._

_You take what he gives and give nothing back._

\----------

The dim cell held a body and a child. The body was an old Banik woman, Stykera, its hand brushing the child’s brow. With a sigh it settled into stillness. The Kalish would remove it within the day.

The child was a ragged tangle of scrap, skin and bone, alone in the heartland of his enemy. Half-hidden beneath the remains of a bandage, his newly formed eye itched and watered. He clutched a withered red petal in his hand.

"I understand. This is mine. Mine. I understand . . . "

He hugged his knees and rocked in a corner, prying strength from the words, the cold, the movement, and above all, the memory of a place. 

\-------------


End file.
